Featured Article

New Robot Autom Wants to Help You with Your Diet

The health and fitness world seems to have embraced technology like few other sectors of our offline life have managed to do. It seems like every week a new program or device hits the market that is designed to help us watch our weight or drop a few pounds. A new robot, dubbed Autom, is just the latest step in trying to find fun and effective ways to help people use the newest technologies to keep them on their diet.

There are a number of different smartphone and tablet applications that allow people to track their calorie intakes or find healthy recipes online that allow them to eat great tasting food without packing on the pounds. The secret to a truly helpful dieting application or piece of technology is that it’s fun and easy to use.

Autom, which was put together thanks to a partnership between Intuitive Automata and PCH International, is pitched as a “healthcare robot coach” that will soon hit the market with a relatively affordable $199 price tag. Autom is more than just a mobile calorie tracker. The robot will take in all sorts of data about a person’s lifestyle and will actually personalize coaching responses based on how the user is adapting their lifestyle.

“The more it learns about the individual user, the more it customizes the feedback advice to keep the individual motivated,” the companies said in a recent joint statement.

The idea is that people will be more apt to actually adjust what they are doing when it comes to exercising or eating when there is a physical presence sitting in the kitchen learning and commenting on the users’ behavior.

The companies say that there is actual research which indicates that diets and workout routines are more effective when using a robotic device to help, rather than mobile apps or computer programs. Along with the $199 price tag, users will need to subscribe to a service that runs $19 a month.